Siberia

This post is about Canada and winter and has as much to do with Siberia as Obama has to do with you getting retrenched.

Growing up in an oven, I had a healthy dose of Western media so I still had a pretty good image in my mind of what winter was like. Whenever I went for short trips to visit other countries in winter, it sure was cold and everything. Never really had much experience with snow however, it tended to be too early in the season or it had only recently snowed when I got there.

Then in '07 I went to Toronto. Damn, that was a massive slap in the face for what winter was like. Black ice, sleet, windrows; the whole nine. I enjoyed myself there and didn't freeze because I was a snugly wrapped burrito.

I thought I had conquered winter. I knew all its tricks. I was the boss, the man. I did not fear some silly season. I came over last year to finish my high school education and it still didn't hit me, because I stayed in a boarding school where class and dorm were one and the same building.

In Fall of 2012, I began my first semester in university in Edmonton. Winter is that feeling when you have an 8 am class and a midterm at 9 am. You're awake at 7 am, all ready to go. You look out the window and it literally looks like shit. Literally. Already you're not feeling too well. Then you check the temperature because you already learnt to beware of the chinook. Forecasts say it's a solid -24 for the next 6 hours. So you sit there and say I'll prepare for the midterm instead of going to class, weather might improve. But then you curl up in bed until 8.30 just wishing it wasn't cold and snowing and everything horrible. Conditions have in fact, worsened. -26 and now some really strong winds blowing from the east. Procrastination has screwed you again. You actually start mentally calculating how damaging missing a midterm would be. In the end I go anyway because I am paranoid.

Point is, winter makes you want to be not there. Now Canada is a really nice country but geezus the land is shitty. It's such a hostile place.

Winter has been so deeply ingrained into me that now I cannot watch a 'winter' scene in a movie and not give a little shiver.

It's cold.

It was very difficult watching Colin Farrell and co in Siberia during the initial part of The Way Back. I was almost glad when there was a change of scenery. It's a great movie by the way.